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1 The First Green Revolution: Debt Peonage and the Making of the Nitrogen Fertilizer Trade, EDWARD D. MELILLO TO MANY HISTORIANS, SCIENTISTS, AND agricultural experts, the term Green Revolution refers to the controversial array of programs and policies that introduced high-yield seeds, intensive irrigation techniques, herbicides, pesticides, mechanization, and petrochemical fertilizers to parts of the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s. Among the most profound consequences of this recent agricultural transformation was a vast increase in the amount of nitrogen available to farmers in Asia and Latin America. Through the application of imported synthetic fertilizers, these cultivators achieved increased yields of staple crops such as corn, rice, and wheat. Numerous scholars have portrayed this twentieth-century intervention in world food production as the first human alteration of the global nitrogen cycle during the modern era. 1 Such a depiction is misleading. It obscures an earlier Green Revolution, beginning in the nineteenth century, during which companies and labor contractors transported millions of metric tons of nitrogen fertilizer and more than 100,000 workers across the globe, producing significant shifts in environments and labor conditions throughout the world. A comprehensive understanding of this First Green Revolution fuses two emerging research areas global environmental history and transnational labor history. An investigation of the relationship between new forms of servitude that emerged in the Age of Abolition and the concurrent development of a worldwide fertilizer trade reveals that the changing nature of work is inextricably intertwined with the work of changing nature. Iamgratefultonumerousreadersofthisessay,mostnotablyDanAllosso,RaymondCraib,Katherine Eisen, Jennifer Fronc, James Gatewood, Nina Gordon, Andrea King, Barbara Krauthamer, Rick López, Laura Lovett, Benjamin Madley, Charles C. Mann, John McNeill, Jerry Melillo, Lalise Melillo, Chantal Norrgard, Dawn Peterson, Elizabeth Pryor, participants in the Five College History Seminar, and fellows of the Crossroads in the Study of the Americas workshop at the Five Colleges, Inc. I presented an earlier version of this article as the 2009 Virginia and Derrick Sherman Emerging Scholar Lecture at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. During that event, I benefited tremendously from comments by W. Taylor Fain, Monica Gisolfi, Philip Sherman, Ann Stapleton, Paul Sutter, Peter Thorsheim, Paul Townend, and other members of the UNCW Department of History. At various stages in this article s development, Gunther Peck, several anonymous reviewers, and the AHR editorial staff helped me to refine and expand my arguments. 1 Treatments of the twentieth-century Green Revolution as the first extensive anthropogenic alteration of the nitrogen cycle include Dietrich Werner and William Edward Newton, eds., Nitrogen Fixation in Agriculture, Forestry, Ecology and the Environment (Dordrecht, 2005); Lance H. Gunderson and C. S. Holling, eds., Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems (Washington, D.C., 2002), 37; David Tilman, The Greening of the Green Revolution, Nature 396, no (1998): ; and Gordon Conway, The Doubly Green Revolution: Food for All in the Twenty-First Century (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997). 1028

2 The First Green Revolution 1029 Between the 1840s and the 1930s, Peru and Chile exported hundreds of millions of tons of nitrogen-rich guano (dried bird excrement) and sodium nitrate (NaNO 3 ) to places as far-flung as California, Virginia, Prussia, Great Britain, and France. For farmers in North America and Europe, guano and sodium nitrate dramatically increased agricultural productivity during the final phase of the Industrial Revolution, which lasted from roughly the mid-1800s through World War I. 2 The widespread availability of imported fertilizers also facilitated a departure from organic closed systems of farming, in which nitrogen is cycled among soil, plants, animals, and people at the local scale, toward open, energy-intensive approaches to agriculture that included additions of nitrogen from distant places. 3 This major human intervention in the nitrogen cycle was closely linked to fundamental shifts in global labor relations during the Age of Abolition (1780s 1880s). In 1807, Britain outlawed the importation of African slaves to its colonial empire. The following year, the United States banned the importation of slaves, while in 1811, Spain abolished chattel slavery at home and in all of its colonies except the sugar islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Santo Domingo. Despite such overwhelming victories for abolitionism, new forms of servitude emerged to replace those that faced extinction. Often these arrangements involved debt peonage, the repayment of loans with fixed periods of physical labor. 4 Prior to the full-scale mechanization of mineral extraction, companies in Peru and Chile met the demanding labor requirements of guano and sodium nitrate mining by exploiting workers who were neither chattel slaves nor wage laborers. The Peruvian government banned slavery in 1854, but offset potential labor shortages with la trata amarilla, theso-called yellowtrade incoercedchineseworkers.between 1847 and 1874, at least 100,000 coolies from China came to Peru aboard an estimated 276 vessels. While many of these laborers toiled on cotton and sugar plantations, worked as domestic servants, or built railroads, thousands performed the arduous task of digging seabird feces. Although employers promised to free coolies from the bonds of servitude after three to five years of work, such releases rarely occurred. 5 2 As Eric Hobsbawm has convincingly argued, the full effects of the Industrial Revolution did not make themselves felt in an obvious and unmistakable way at any rate outside England until quite late in our period; certainly not before 1830, probably not before 1840 or thereabouts ; Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution: Europe, (London, 1962), 27. Others have used the term second industrial revolution to describe the period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in which such quintessentially modern technological devices as the telephone, the radio, the automobile, and the aircraft emerged. See, for example, Perry Anderson, Modernity and Revolution, New Left Review 144 (March April 1984): , here During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, sodium nitrate was variously known as salitre, saltpeter, saltpetre, nitre, nitrate(s), and nitrate of soda. Peruvian guano contains approximately 15 percent nitrogen, while sodium nitrate contains approximately 16 percent nitrogen. T. M. Addiscott, Nitrate, Agriculture and the Environment (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), IhaveusedSeymourDrescher stimeframefortheageofabolition(1780s 1880s).Drescher, Whose Abolition? Popular Pressure and the Ending of the British Slave Trade, Past & Present 143, no. 1 (1994): Watt Stewart claims that 90,000 Chinese arrived in Peru during this period; Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru: A History of the Chinese Coolie in Peru, (Durham, N.C., 1951), 74. Arnold J. Meagher puts the number at 109,146; Meagher, The Coolie Trade: The Traffic in Chinese Laborers to Latin America, (Philadelphia, 2008), 222 n For ship numbers, see Walton Look Lai, Chinese Indentured Labor: Migrations to the British West Indies in the Nineteenth Century, Amerasia 15, no. 2 (1989): , here 120. The term coolie may have originated as a derivation of the Tamil

3 1030 Edward D. Melillo Chilean nitrate firms used a similarly coercive labor regime known as the enganche system. In the 1880s, recruiters for the Nitrate Producers Association began enlisting migrant workers in Chile, Bolivia, and Peru. Enganchadores, literally ones who press or trick others into performing a service, hosted raucous, liquor-soaked carnivals where they enticed migrant laborers with tales of the boomtown fortunes to be made in the Norte Grande, the northernmost region of Chile. Once these men signed on, they found themselves at the mercy of company agents who routinely ignored contractual obligations. Debt for his passage to the mines became the interminable bond that kept each worker toiling endlessly for his contractor. 6 As a result, the First Green Revolution from the 1840s to the 1930s not only represented an unprecedented human intervention in the global nitrogen cycle, it also relied upon a new configuration of transnational labor relations. Debt peons from China, Chile, Bolivia, Peru, and other regions of the Pacific world mined for the companies that exported nitrogen-rich compounds from South America s islands and deserts. The fertilizer trade was instrumental in mobilizing new sources of nutrients and motivating innovative labor regimes. In an era in which modern technologies of movement, such as the train, the steamboat, and the steel-hulled clipper ship, began to compress the experience of space and time, capital rapidly exploited new zones of untapped resources. 7 Guano and sodium nitrate were valuable not merely because of their nitrogen content; they were prized because they could be transferred swiftly and inexpensively from South America s Pacific shores to the increasingly degraded soils of the Atlantic world. 8 In a similar display of rapid transnational displacement, employers moved workers from their homelands to distant job sites. These relocations facilitated unprecedented labor control for those who organized the trade in debt peons. Mining companies and plantation owners, faced with a post-slavery world order, used new word for wages, ku li.seehenryyuleanda.c.burnell,hobson-jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo- Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, new ed., ed. William Crooke (London, 1903), 250. In South America, the Caribbean, and the North American West, coolie was a derogatory term for cheap, servile laborers. In 1821, there were at least 41,228 slaves of African descent in Peru. Mario E. Del Rio, La inmigración y su desarrollo en el Perú (Lima, 1929), 38. On Peruvian abolition, see Carlos Aguirre, Agentes de su propia libertad: Los esclavos de Lima y la desintegración de la esclavitud, (Lima, 1993). 6 Sergio González Miranda, Hombres y mujeres de la Pampa: Tarapacá enelciclodeexpansión del salitre, 2nded.(Santiago,2002), ;MichaelMonteón, The Enganche in the Chilean Nitrate Sector, , Latin American Perspectives 6, no. 3 (1979): 66 79; and Roberto Hernández-Cornejo, El salitre: Resúmen histórico desde su descubrimiento y explotación (Valparaíso, 1930), Even highly innovative histories of the nineteenth-century global fertilizer trade overlook the unifying theme of Pacific world debt peonage. See, for example, Rory Miller and Robert Greenhill, The Fertilizer Commodity Chains: Guano and Nitrate, , in Steven Topik, Carlos Marichal, and Zephyr Frank, eds., From Silver to Cocaine: Latin American Commodity Chains and the Building of the World Economy, (Durham, N.C., 2006), Geographer David Harvey refers to time-space compression in The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford, 1989), On the relation between new modes of transportation and the guano trade, see Kenneth Pomeranz and Steven Topik, The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, and the World Economy, 1400 to the Present (New York, 1999), Soil degradation implies the temporary or permanent lowering of the soil s productive capacity. Decreasing soil fertility is one aspect of soil degradation. Others include erosion, salinization, acidification, pollution, and compaction. J. K. Syers, Managing Soils for Long-Term Productivity, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences 352, no (1997): , here 1012.

4 The First Green Revolution 1031 configurations of the long-distance labor trade to extract maximum surplus value from their workers, relegating millions of men and women to what Moon-Ho Jung calls the legal and cultural borderland between slavery and freedom. 9 Through contractual agreements and their attendant promises of steady work and entrepreneurial potential, the coolie trade and the enganche system isolated laborers from familiar landscapes and made quitting impossible for debt peons. Gunther Peck s notion of the geography of labor mobility offers a conceptual framework for understanding how the labor power of these workers became commodified through spatial dislocation. As Peck demonstrates in Reinventing Free Labor, laborcontractors in the late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century North American West created structures of coercion and established relations of debt peonage by controlling the traffic in workers across vast spaces and between jobs. 10 Like the labor conditions of the remote and inhospitable worksites that Peck profiles, guano extraction and nitrate mining were grueling jobs located in South America s most austere environments. Corporations that demanded regimented production schedules without seasonal relief had difficulty convincing small farmers to abandon their subsistence lifestyles and submit to new modes of capitalist work discipline. During the final phase of the Industrial Revolution, European and North American cash-crop production, from sugar beets to hops and cotton to tobacco, depended on an unprecedented acceleration of productivity from both a growing migrant labor force and thoroughly overworked soils. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, input-intensive agriculture developed rapidly as farmers on both sides of the Atlantic attempted to achieve higher crop yields. In many cases, such open systems of farming replaced local recycling of nutrients and the widespread use of long fallow periods of soil recovery characteristic of traditional agriculture. Such shifts constituted a prolonged phase of restlessness for both the earth and those who reshaped its contours; additionally, this global explosion of productivity depended on new substitutions for outdated labor regimes and obsolete land-use practices. 11 As a result, employers turned to debt peonage to solve the quandary of labor conscription in a geopolitical context where the African slave trade was increasingly outlawed. The hostile environments and the dangerous, backbreaking tasks of guano and sodium nitrate extraction magnified the unforgiving working conditions that itinerant miners faced, while the absence of institutional oversight in these remote mineral frontiers allowed the companies that profited from the lucrative fertilizer trade to use particularly coercive tactics. The global abolition of chattel slavery cre- 9 Moon-Ho Jung, Outlawing Coolies : Race, Nation, and Empire in the Age of Emancipation, American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): , here Gunther Peck, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the North American West, (Cambridge, 2000), E. P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism, Past & Present 38, no. 1 (1967): On Britain s agricultural transition away from frequent fallowing toward more intensive forms of cultivation that involved legume rotation and field grass husbandry, see Robert Allen, Agriculture during the Industrial Revolution, in Roderick Floud and Donald McCloskey, eds., The Economic History of Britain since 1700, 2nded.(NewYork,1994),vol.1: , ,here114;and Phyllis Deane, The First Industrial Revolution, 2nded.(NewYork,1979),39.Foraccountsofasimilar transition in the American South, see Julius Rubin, The Limits of Agricultural Progress in the Nineteenth-Century South, Agricultural History 49, no. 2 (1975): , here 363.

5 1032 Edward D. Melillo ated new labor shortages on proto-industrial plantations and in mines, and an array of brutally innovative indenture arrangements emerged to meet capital s pressing demand for cheap labor. 12 By relocating workers to isolated landscapes, labor bosses undermined a traditional repertoire of political, economic, and social alternatives for these laborers. Thus, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the coerced migration of workers through debt peonage relations and the displacement of nutrients from the Pacific world toward the United States and Europe produced a double movement that revolutionized global agricultural production. Despite its potential yields, the analytical terrain at the crossroads of environmental history and labor history has drawn the attention of few scholars. During the 1990s, Richard White urged his colleagues to reject a larger tendency to define humans as being outside of nature, an approach that arises from a disdain and distrust of those who most obviously work in nature. 13 White called for greater attention to the ways that humans have experienced knowing nature through labor. 14 In 2008, Chad Montrie pushed White s argument further, encouraging scholars to think more concretely about how alienation from the products of our work produces estrangement from our environments. That same year, Thomas Andrews argued for heightened attentiveness to the processes that structure what he called workscapes, places that are shaped by the interplay of human labor and natural processes. 15 While a few historians have responded to these urgings, our growing awareness of the (quite literally) constructed nature of historical landscapes still needs extensive reworking For more on the development of industrial processes on Caribbean sugar plantations and in silver mines in the Americas, which predated Europe s Industrial Revolution, see Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York, 1985); and Peter Bakewell, Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, (Albuquerque, 1984). On the use of Chinese debt peons as a solution to Peruvian labor shortages in the 1840s, see Michael J. Gonzales, Chinese Plantation Workers and Social Conflict in Peru, in James Gerber and Lei Guang, eds., Agriculture and Rural Connections in the Pacific, (Burlington, Vt., 2006), , here 110. In the context of latenineteenth-century Cuban sugar production, Rebecca Scott has made a similar argument for the relationship between the use of Chinese labor and the abolition of the African slave trade; Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, (Pittsburgh, 2000), Richard White, Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living? Work and Nature, in William Cronon, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (New York, 1996), , here 172. For similar claims, see John C. Berg, ed., Teamsters and Turtles? U.S. Progressive Political Movements in the 21st Century (Lanham, Md., 2002). 14 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995), Chad Montrie, Making a Living: Work and Environment in the United States (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2008), 7; and Thomas G. Andrews, Killing for Coal: America s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge, Mass., 2008), Lissa K. Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish Sea (Seattle, 2012); Thomas Miller Klubock, The Nature of the Frontier: Forests and Peasant Uprisings in Southern Chile, Social History 36, no. 2 (2011): ; Lawrence M. Lipin, Workers and the Wild: Conservation, Consumerism, and Labor in Oregon, (Urbana, Ill., 2007); Gunther Peck, The Nature of Labor: Fault Lines and Common Ground in Environmental and Labor History, Environmental History 11, no. 2 (2006): ; John Soluri, Banana Cultures: Agriculture, Consumption, and Environmental Change in Honduras and the United States (Austin, Tex., 2005); Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush (Seattle, 2003); and Karl Jacoby, Crimes against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves, and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley, Calif., 2001). For an earlier example of productive connections between labor history and environmental history, see Mart A. Stewart, What Nature Suffers to Groe : Life, Labor, and Landscape on the Georgia Coast, (Athens, Ga., 1996). Geographers have long recognized the interconnectedness of social and ecological struggles. See, for example, Don Mitchell, The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers

6 The First Green Revolution 1033 Such shifts in perspective require innovations in the conceptual structure of historical inquiry. The contours of ecosystems are notoriously evasive and rarely match the treaty-bound perimeters of nation-states; consequently, the study of human-ecological interactions through time necessitates a transnational viewpoint, even a transoceanic one. Writing history beyond national boundaries, in turn, generates new understandings of shifting labor practices and corresponding social transformations. Although Thomas Bender has become one of the most visible proponents of transnational history, younger scholars are supplementing his work with their own sophisticated critiques of nation-centered and comparative national histories. The hallmark of a transnational approach to the past, notes Micol Seigel, is that Without losing sight of the potent forces nations have become, it understands them as fragile, constructed, imagined. Transnational history treats the nation as one among a range of social phenomena to be studied, rather than the frame of the study itself. 17 Unfortunately, debt peonage research has tended to reify the framework of the nation-state. Although scholars of slavery and abolition have described and analyzed types of bonded labor, such as sharecropping, that emerged as a shadow of slavery in the postbellum U.S. South, few juxtapose these manifestations of indenture in the southern United States with equally coercive labor arrangements beyond the Atlantic world after slavery s demise. 18 Similarly, while Latin American historians have explored relations of debt peonage in national contexts, they have yet to reflect upon the ways in which the combined arrangements of the Pacific coolie trade and the enganche system offered an alternative transnational labor regime to the increasingly fragmented nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade. 19 In 2000, David Brion Davis and the California Landscape (Minneapolis, 1996); and David Harvey, Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference (Cambridge, Mass., 1996). 17 Thomas Bender, ed., Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, Calif., 2002); and Micol Seigel, Beyond Compare: Comparative Method after the Transnational Turn, Radical History Review 91 (Winter 2005): 62 90, here 63. On the persistence of the historical profession s nation-centered focus, see José C.Moya, AContinentofImmigrants:PostcolonialShiftsintheWesternHemisphere, Hispanic American Historical Review 86, no. 1 (2006): Also valuable in this vein are the chapters in Antoinette Burton, ed., After the Imperial Turn: Thinking with and through the Nation (Durham, N.C., 2003). For an overview of the possible pitfalls and unacknowledged hierarchies characteristic of transnational history, see David Kazanjian and María Josefina Saldaña-Portillo, Introduction: The Traffic in History, Social Text 92, vol. 25, no. 3 (2007): Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, (Urbana, Ill., 1972). Important exceptions to this tendency include Sven Beckert, Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War, American Historical Review 109, no. 5 (December 2004): ; and Matthew Pratt Guterl, After Slavery: Asian Labor, the American South, and the Age of Emancipation, Journal of World History 14, no. 2 (2003): Elizabeth Dore, Debt Peonage in Granada, Nicaragua, : Labor in a Noncapitalist Transition, Hispanic American Historical Review 83, no. 3 (August 2003): ; Mark Moberg, Crown Colony as Banana Republic: The United Fruit Company in British Honduras, , Journal of Latin American Studies 28, no. 2 (1996): ; Alan Knight, Mexican Peonage: What Was It and Why Was It?, Journal of Latin American Studies 18, no. 1 (1986): 41 74; David McCreery, Debt Servitude in Rural Guatemala, , Hispanic American Historical Review 63, no. 4 (1983): ; and Friedrich Katz, Labor Conditions on Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies, Hispanic American Historical Review 54, no. 1 (1974): 1 47, here For comparative approaches, see Tom Brass, Unfree Labour and Capitalist Restructuring in the Agrarian Sector: Peru and India, Journal of Peasant Studies 14, no. 1 (1986): 50 77; and Brass, The Latin American Enganche System: Some Revisionist Reinterpretations Revisited, Slavery and Abolition 11, no. 1 (1990): Calls for a transnationalizing of labor history include Michael P. Hanagan, An Agenda for Transnational Labor History, International Review of Social History 49, no. 3 (2004): ; Beverly J.

7 1034 Edward D. Melillo reminded the readers of the American Historical Review, Eventually,theAtlantic Slave System did reach across the Pacific and was partially replaced by a Pacific labor system that included Hawaii and the Philippines and that drew on coolie labor from India, China, and other parts of Asia. 20 Davis s remark can be expanded to link the work of debt peons in the Pacific world to the agricultural shifts that characterized the final phase of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and North America. THE KEY ELEMENT OF THESE TRANSFORMATIONS was nitrogen, one of several macronutrients including phosphorus and potassium that plants need for survival. Nitrogen is a building block of nucleic acids, proteins, chlorophyll, and enzymes. The earth s atmosphere is composed of approximately 79 percent triple-bonded nitrogen gas (N 2 ), while the remaining 21 percent is oxygen, along with trace amounts of other gases. Despite the ubiquity of gaseous nitrogen, only a small percentage of this atmospheric supply is readily available to terrestrial organisms. Atmospheric N 2 is highly unreactive; most plants cannot use this nitrogen unless it is transformed into reactive (N r )forms,includingammonium(nh 4 )andnitrate(no 3 ). One of the few pathways through which atmospheric nitrogen becomes usable to plants is biofixation, or the conversion of inert N 2 into organic compounds, such as amino acids, which are further transformed by microbes to produce NH 4 and NO 3.Biofixation can be carried out by Rhizobium bacteria attached to the roots of leguminous plants, including soybeans and clover, or by other free-living microbes, such as cyanobacteria. Lightning, volcanic activity, and forest fires, as well as high-temperature combustion of fossil fuels, can also produce the extreme temperatures necessary for the fixation of nitrogen. Additionally, the recycling of crop residues, manures, or human waste can help to preserve the pool of reactive nitrogen within an ecosystem. 21 In the millennia following the Neolithic Revolution (ca. 10,000 B.C.E.), most agrarian societies began recycling human and animal waste. The Roman writer Lucius Columella (4 70 C.E.) urged farmers to bring as food for newly ploughed fallow ground whatever stuff the privy vomits from its filthy sewers. Almost two millennia later, a Chinese imperial treatise from 1737 commented, The southerners accumulate nightsoil in pits. They treasure nightsoil as if it were gold. Nutrient-rich manures even altered relations between pastoralists and sedentary peoples. For ex- Silver, The Forces of Labor: Workers Movements and Globalization since 1870 (Cambridge, 2003); and Marcel van der Linden, Transnationalizing American Labor History, Journal of American History 86, no. 3 (1999): David Brion Davis, Looking at Slavery from Broader Perspectives, American Historical Review 105, no. 2 (April 2000): , here 454 n For more on human alterations of the nitrogen cycle, see James N. Galloway and Ellis B. Cowling, Reactive Nitrogen and the World: 200 Years of Change, Ambio 31, no. 2 (2002): 64 71; D. S. Jenkinson, The Impact of Humans on the Nitrogen Cycle, with Focus on Temperate Arable Agriculture, Plant and Soil 228, no. 1 (2001): 3 15; and Peter M. Vitousek et al., Human Alteration of the Global Nitrogen Cycle: Sources and Consequences, Ecological Applications 7, no. 3 (1997): An elegant treatment of the role of clover in world history can be found in Thorkild Kjærgaard, A Plant That Changed the World: The Rise and Fall of Clover, , Landscape Research 28, no. 1 (2003): On the role of phosphorus fertilizer in world food production, see Dana Cordell, Jan-Olof Drangert, and Stuart White, The Story of Phosphorus: Global Food Security and Food for Thought, Global Environmental Change 19, no. 2 (2009):

8 The First Green Revolution 1035 ample, in precolonial East Africa, manure from the cattle raised by Hinda clans fertilized the banana crops grown by neighboring Haya cultivators. 22 Farmers around the world also discovered the value of cultivating nitrogen-fixing legumes, such as alfalfa, clover, peanuts, beans, peas, and lentils. As early as the fourth century B.C.E., Xenophon of Athens remarked that legume cultivation was a successful remedy for soil exhaustion. Likewise, the ancient Chinese ideogram shu, which represented the soybean, had a row of vertical marks at its base to denote the relationship between the plant s root nodules and its soil-enhancing properties. 23 In the Americas, legumes featured prominently in the foodways of ancient civilizations. Archaeologists digging among prehistoric ruins in Peru unearthed so many peanut shells that they joked that the site bore a strong resemblance to the main entry of Yankee Stadium after a Saturday game. 24 During the nineteenth century, European and North American farmers began to abandon closed systems of nutrient recycling, which had connected neighboring urban and rural communities. Previously, poudrette (human excrement, dried and mixed with charcoal and gypsum), furnace ashes, ground bone, and dried blood from slaughterhouses had provided urban contributions to rural soil fertility. In return, city dwellers had consumed the produce of nearby farms. By the mid-1800s, openended systems arose, which depended on foreign commodities, including imported seeds, machinery, and fertilizers. These inputs often traveled great distances to reach the farms where they were applied. 25 In 1857, Karl Marx summarized this transition: agriculture no longer finds the natural conditions of its own production within itself, naturally arisen, spontaneous, and ready to hand, but these exist as an independent industry separate from it. 26 Guano and sodium nitrate were products of such an independent industry, and their 22 Lucius Iunius Moderatus Columella, as quoted in Naomi F. Miller and Kathryn L. Gleason, Fertilizer in the Identification and Analysis of Cultivated Soil, in Miller and Gleason, eds., The Archaeology of Garden and Field (Philadelphia, 1994), 38; Qinding shoushi tongkao, asquotedinyongxue, Treasure Nightsoil as If It Were Gold : Economic and Ecological Links between Urban and Rural Areas in Late Imperial Jiangnan, Late Imperial China 26, no. 1 (2005): 41 71, here 60; and Roland Oliver, The East African Interior, in J. D. Fage and Roland Oliver, eds., The Cambridge History of Africa, 8vols. (New York, ), 3: , here 640. For more examples, see Eugene Mather and John Fraser Hart, The Geography of Manure, Land Economics 32, no. 1 (1956): Kimberly B. Flint-Hamilton, Legumes in Ancient Greece and Rome: Food, Medicine, or Poison?, Hesperia 68, no. 3 (1999): , here 373. In 1963, Hu Daojing analyzed Shang Dynasty ( B.C.E.) bronze artifacts that featured the ancient character shu. Hu argued that the marks on the lower half of this ideogram represented an early understanding of the soybean s role in soil fertility. See Hui-Lin Li, The Domestication of Plants in China: Ecogeographical Considerations, in David N. Keightley, ed., The Origins of Chinese Civilization (Berkeley, Calif., 1983), 21 63, here 30. The nitrogen derived from increased legume cultivation helped to drive the dramatic expansion in Europe s agricultural productivity from 1750 to On this point, see G. P. H. Chorley, The Agricultural Revolution in Northern Europe, : Nitrogen, Legumes, and Crop Productivity, Economic History Review 34, no. 1 (1981): 71 93, here Gordon R. Willey, Foreword, in Margaret A. Towle, The Ethnobotany of Pre-Columbian Peru (Chicago, 1961), ix. 25 Richard A. Wines, Fertilizer in America: From Waste Recycling to Resource Exploitation (Philadelphia, 1985), 3. On the transition from so-called closed systems to open ones in European and U.S. history, see Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New York, 1999), 14 15; F. M. L. Thompson, The Second Agricultural Revolution, , Economic History Review 21, no. 1 (1968): 62 77, here 64; and Arthur G. Peterson, Agriculture in the United States, 1839 and 1939, Journal of Farm Economics 22, no. 1 (1940): Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans.martinnicolaus (London, 1973), 527.

9 1036 Edward D. Melillo widespread availability contributed to the emerging metabolic rift between the city and the countryside. The development of input-intensive agriculture was neither instantaneous nor inevitable. Regions of Europe and North America shifted away from tight nutrient-cycling loops between urban and rural communities at different times and with varying degrees of resistance. 27 Ahandfulofsocialreformerslamentedthispartition,beggingtheirfellowcitizens to bridge the expanding chasm between city and farm. In his 1862 novel Les Misérables, VictorHugowrote, Thereisnoguanocomparableinfertilitywiththe detritus of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand, is gold. 28 Twelve years later, a California writer compared the nutrient-cycling failures of his own city to those of Hugo s Paris: Is it possible that San Francisco possesses no man of sufficient business far-sight to see that he might accumulate a mint of wealth by paying the city a round sum for the contents of its privy-vaults and sewers, and handling it on the suburban sand hills, and with it flooding the country with early vegetables? 29 For the most part, however, such enterprising suggestions fell upon deaf ears. Arevolutioninsoilscience,resultinginthedevelopmentofmanufacturedfertilizers, hastened this evolving metabolic rift between the city and the country. 30 Prior to the mid-1800s, farmers, blacksmiths, and estate owners, lacking formal scientific training, developed what Steven Stoll has aptly labeled dunghill doctrines. 31 These advances in European and North American agriculture contributed to prevailing understandings of soil dynamics and coalesced as commitments to the continued fertility of the land. In 1840, however, when German chemist Justus von Liebig published his groundbreaking treatise on fertilizer and soils, Organic Chemistry in Its 27 Karl Marx frequently used the German term Stoffwechsel, ormetabolism,whendiscussingproductive relations between humans and nature. In his analysis of the rise of industrial agriculture, he built upon Justus von Liebig s pioneering soil science (see nn. 32 and 33) and introduced the notion of an irreparable rift in the interdependent processes of social metabolism, a metabolism prescribed by the natural laws of life itself. The result of this is a squandering of the vitality of the soil, which is carried by trade far beyond the bounds of a single country. Marx, Capital, 3vols.( ;repr.,NewYork, 1981), 3: 949. For more on the centrality of the metabolic metaphor in Marx s writing, see Fernando Coronil, The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (Chicago, 1997), 26 27; John Bellamy Foster, Marx s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology, American Journal of Sociology 105, no. 2 (1999): ; and Jason W. Moore, Environmental Crises and the Metabolic Rift in World-Historical Perspective, Organization & Environment 13, no. 2 (2000): Victor Hugo, as quoted in Sabine Barles and Laurence Lestel, The Nitrogen Question: Urbanization, Industrialization, and River Quality in Paris, Journal of Urban History 33, no. 5 (2007): , here W. W. Carpenter, Sanitary and Economical Use of Night-Soil in Paris, The California Agriculturalist, July1,1874,157.FormoreonEuropeanevaluationsofurbannutrientreuse,seeErland Mårald, Everything Circulates: Agricultural Chemistry and Recycling Theories in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century, Environment and History 8, no. 1 (2002): Examples of the metabolic metaphor in urban history include Maria Kaïka, City of Flows: Modernity, Nature, and the City (New York, 2005); Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, Mass., 2002); Joel A. Tarr, The Metabolism of the Industrial City: The Case of Pittsburgh, Journal of Urban History 28, no. 5 (2002): ; J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth Century (New York, 2000), ; and William Cronon, Nature s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991). 31 Steven Stoll, Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 2002), 49.

10 The First Green Revolution 1037 Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, heusheredinaneraofscientificfarming. As Liebig contended, It must be admitted as a principle of agriculture, that those substances which have been removed from a soil must be completely restored to it...atimewillcomewhenthefieldswillbemanuredwithasolutionofglass(silicate of potash), with the ashes of burnt straw, and with salts of phosphoric acid, prepared in chemical manufactories, exactly as present medicines are given for fever and goiter. 32 If soil exhaustion was the ailment, Liebig s remedy was neither cow dung nor clover, but rather a potent manufactured combination of chemical fertilizers. 33 One year after Liebig s monumental work appeared, French scientist Alexandre Cochet published the results of his experiments on guano from the Chincha Islands. The Chinchas, three granite islands located 13 miles (21 kilometers) off the southwest coast of Peru, were covered in guano from the Guanay cormorant (Phalacrocorax bougainvillii), the Peruvian booby (Sula variegate), and the Peruvian brown pelican (Pelicanus occidentalis thagus), which feed on the anchovetas (Engraulis ringens) andpacificsardines(sardinops sagax) thatthriveinthecold,nutrient-rich waters of the Humboldt Current. Because the Peruvian coast is among the driest places on earth, there was rarely enough rainfall to dissolve the accumulated excrement. Over many millennia, these chalky deposits became fossilized storehouses of nitrogen, phosphates, and alkaline salts. 34 Centuries before Francisco Pizarro s conquest of Peru ( ), the Quechua-speaking farmers of the region had raised the yields of their coastal maize crops with regular applications of guano. In his 1609 Comentarios reales de los Incas, Garcilaso Inca de la Vega recalled, On the sea coast, from below Arequipa to Tarapaca, a distance of more than two hundred leagues, they use no other manure than the droppings of sea birds, of which there are large and small along all the coast, and they fly in such enormous flocks that it would be incredible to any one who had not seen them. They breed on certain desert islands on the coast, and the quantity they make is also incredible. From a distance these heaps of manure look like the peaks 32 Justus von Liebig, Organic Chemistry in Its Applications to Agriculture and Physiology, inliebig, Liebig s Complete Works on Chemistry, ed.lyonplayfair(philadelphia,1852),63.benjaminr.cohen has offered a nuanced account of how soil science became culturally credible in the antebellum United States, emphasizing the gradual and contested nature of this process; Cohen, Notes from the Ground: Science, Soil and Society in the American Countryside (New Haven, Conn., 2009), x. 33 To his credit, Liebig was deeply critical of the British for importing guano while simultaneously flushing nutrient-rich human excrement to the sea. See Justus von Liebig, Familiar Letters: In Its Relations to Physiology, Dietetics, Agriculture, Commerce, and Political Economy, 3rded.(London,1851),473. British scientists Sir John Bennett Lawes and Sir Joseph Henry Gilbert, who co-founded the Rothamstead Research Station in Hertfordshire, were also fundamental to the development of fertilizer science. In 1843, Lawes patented a process for decomposing bones with sulfuric acid to create the superphosphates that British farmers applied in copious quantities to their fields. For more on agricultural innovations before the rise of formal soil chemistry, see Wallace E. Huffman and Robert E. Evenson, Science for Agriculture: A Long-Term Perspective (Ames, Iowa, 1993), 15. North American farmers had access to summaries of Liebig s findings almost immediately in the agricultural press. See, for example, Notice of Liebig s Organic Chemistry, Applied to Agriculture, The Cultivator 8(May1841): On the guano birds and their relationship to the Humboldt Current, see the essays in D. Pauly and I. Tsukayama, eds., The Peruvian Anchoveta and Its Upwelling Ecosystem: Three Decades of Change (Callao, Peru, 1987). For a discussion of the relationship between guano bird productivity and El Niño events, see Brian Fagan, Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations (New York, 1999), chap. 2. Among the most comprehensive scientific works on guano is G. Evelyn Hutchinson, The Biogeochemistry of Vertebrate Excretion (New York, 1950).

11 1038 Edward D. Melillo of snowy mountains. 35 Despite such astounding claims, Garcilaso s observations went unheeded for two centuries. It was not until Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt spent the years from 1799 to 1804 in the Americas that Europe s chemists and agronomists took notice of Pacific Coast fertilizers. In 1802, while visiting the Peruvian port city of Callao, Humboldt (after whom the northwesterly Pacific current takes its name) explored guano s growth-promoting properties. Upon his return to Europe, he shared his findings with his colleagues and sparked a new interest in the Peruvian product. By the 1820s, North American agricultural journals were informing their readers of Peru s soil-enhancing bird dung. 36 Like Humboldt, French mining engineer Jean Baptiste Boussingault traveled extensively throughout South America, living there for more than a decade. He visited Peru s northern harbor of Paita in 1832 and remarked, Along a great extent of the coast of Peru, the soil, which is perfectly barren of itself is rendered fertile, and is made to yield abundant crops, by the application of guano. 37 Once soil scientists endorsed guano, the next step for eager commercial interests was to organize the means of extracting the foul-smelling product for export from the Pacific coast to Atlantic ports. THOUSANDS OF CHINESE DEBT PEONS, knowncolloquiallyascolonos asiáticos (Asian settlers), undertook the task of digging seabird feces. In the 1840s, capitalists and their state sponsors began relying on the coolie trade for cheap, unskilled labor. British imperial officials orchestrated the sea change from the transatlantic slave trade to the transpacific traffic in debt peons. Nominally, Chinese migration followed the imperatives of free labor, or contractual wage work with the freedom to quit. British Foreign Secretary Lord John Russell underscored this notion. On July 11, 1860, he contended that his country s encouragement of the coolie trade represented adecisivestandforabolitionismandfreelabor: HerMajesty sgovernment,therefore proposes, with a view to the final extinction of the Slave Trade... a plan of emigration from China regulated by agents of the European nations in conjunction with the Chinese authorities. 38 Despite Russell s rhetoric, countless testimonials concerning the brutal realities of transpacific debt peonage contradicted such emancipatory claims Garcilaso Inca de la Vega was the son of Spanish conquistador Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega and the Inca princess Isabel Suárez Chimpu Ocllo. The stories Garcilaso related in the Comentarios are tales he heard as a child growing up in Cuzco. Garcilaso Inca de la Vega, First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, trans.clementsr.markham,2vols.(1609;repr.,newyork,1963),2:11.for other examples of early European interest in guano, see Amédée François Frézier, AVoyagetothe South-Sea, and along the Coasts of Chile and Peru, in the Years 1712, 1713, and 1714 (London, 1717); and Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, AVoyagetoSouthAmerica,trans.JohnAdams(1807;repr., Boston, 1978). 36 Arthur P. Whitaker, Alexander von Humboldt and Spanish America, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 104, no. 3 (1960): , here 321; and Guano A Celebrated Manure Used in South America, American Farmer 6(December1824): Jean Baptiste Boussingault, Rural Economy, in Its Relation with Chemistry, Physics, and Meteorology; or, Chemistry Applied to Agriculture, trans.georgelaw(newyork,1850), Lord John Russell, as quoted in Meagher, The Coolie Trade, On the disparity between the British government s attitude toward African slavery in the Atlantic

12 The First Green Revolution 1039 Vessels, it appears, are equipped for the business upon the model of slave ships, explained a New York Daily Times correspondent in 1853 when describing the ships transporting Chinese workers to Peru. The victims men, and even children are kidnapped. They are crowded down between low decks, where any other than a prone or sitting posture is out of the question. 40 One in every ten of these men and boys died during the grueling journey, while those who survived ended up on Peru s coastal plantations or spent countless years shoveling guano. 41 Guano excavation ranked among the world s deadliest and least remunerative jobs. Contractors demanded that each worker mine a quota of four tons per day for the meager wage of three reales,orsevenpesos,permonth. 42 As an English observer was appalled to find, During the last quarter of 1875, it is reported that there were 355 Chinamen employed [on one of the Chincha Islands], of whom no less than 98 were in the hospital. The general sickness is swelled legs, caused, it is supposed, by drinking condensed water not sufficiently cooled, and by a lack of vegetable diet. 43 In addition, the ammonia-laden guano dust triggered devastating ailments in the lungs of those who constantly breathed the foul-smelling, acrid powder. Such horrendous conditions led to drastic measures; suicide among guano workers was so common that notices of its occurrence appeared regularly in El Commercio and El Nacional, Peru sleadingnineteenth-centurynewspapers. 44 Guano mining was rarely mechanized. As of 1853, two steam shovels operated on the north island of the Chinchas, but manual labor persisted. 45 George Washworld and forms of debt peonage in the Pacific world, see Lawrence Phillips, British Slavery after Abolition: The Pacific Trade, Race & Class 41, no. 3 (2000): The Asiatic Slave Trade, New York Daily Times, July22,1853,4. 41 Carlos Contreras and Marcos Cueto, Historia del Perú contemporáneo: Desde las luchas por la Independencia hasta el presente, 2nded.(Lima,2000), ;MichaelJ.Gonzales,Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, (Austin, Tex., 1985), esp. chap. 5; and Jonathan V. Levin, The Export Economies: Their Pattern of Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), 85 90, The most comprehensive study of Chinese coolie laborers on Peruvian cotton and sugar plantations is Humberto Rodríguez Pastor, Hijos del Celeste Imperio en el Perú ( ): Migración, agricultura, mentalidad y explotación (Lima, 1990). The Chinese migration to Peru was overwhelmingly male. The incomplete Peruvian census of 1872 lists 12,849 Chinese living in the four coastal provinces of Lamabayeque, Chiclayo, Trujillo, and Pacsamayo. Of those, only 15 were women. See the Censo de 1872, Archivo General de Peru, as cited in Evelyn Hu-DeHart, Latin America in Asia-Pacific Perspective, in Rhacel S. Parreñas and Lok C. D. Siu, eds., Asian Diasporas: New Formations, New Conceptions (Stanford, Calif., 2007), 58 n Nicolás de Piérola, Informe sobre el estado del carguío de huano en las Islas de Chincha, y sobre el cumplimiento del contrato celebrado con D. Domingo Elías (Lima, 1853), 4; and Antonio Raimondi, Informes y polémicas sobre el guano y el salitre (Perú )(Lima, 2003), 64. For a detailed discussion of wage rates on the Chinchas, see W. M. Mathew, A Primitive Export Sector: Guano Production in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Peru, Journal of Latin American Studies 9, no. 1 (1977): 35 57, here Fitz-Roy Cole, as quoted in Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru,97.Amongthemostcomprehensive sources on guano island labor is Cecilia Méndez G., Los trabajadores guaneros del Perú, (Lima, 1987). 44 Vivid firsthand testimonials about the horrifying stench of the Chinchas can be found in the account of French engineer André Bresson,Bolivia: Sept années d explorations, de voyages et de séjours dans l Amérique australe (Paris, 1886), ; and George W. Peck, Melbourne, and the Chincha Islands: With Sketches of Lima, and a Voyage round the World (New York, 1854), Peter Blanchard, The Transitional Man in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: The Case of Domingo Elias of Peru, Bulletin of Latin American Research 15, no. 2 (1996): ; and Mathew, A Primitive Export Sector, 49. Although William S. Otis patented the steam shovel in 1839, his machines were cumbersome; few excavators used them until the 1880s. See Samuel Stueland, The Otis

13 1040 Edward D. Melillo FIGURE 1: Guano Mining Operations on Peru s Chincha Islands in Note workers quarters in the foreground and mined cliffs of guano in the background. Albumen print, photographer unknown. Courtesy of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Mass. ington Peck, who sailed from Australia to Peru in 1853, described how Chinese workers conveyed the guano to waiting ships: Coolies, who are obliged to wear thick bandages over their mouths, push the guano down to the lower ends of the mangueras [hoses], where there are openings connected with shutes, or long canvas pipes, about as large [a]round as barrels, that lead down to the bases of the cliff. Through these the guano is conducted into launches, or directly into the holds of vessels loading. 46 On the receiving end, deckhands risked being sucked into the avalanche of powder. As a Yankee captain related to the Providence Journal, Cases have occurred where men have slipped in at the mouth of the hose as the guano went in or down, and were never seen again, or dead, if found at all. 47 Burial at sea had never implied such a dreadful fate. As ships laden with guano departed the Chinchas, boats crammed with Chinese laborers arrived to replace deceased or terminally ill miners. The coolie trade between China and Peru was big business. Recognizing this, the leading inter-american shipping house of W. R. Grace and Company sought to expand its enterprises by transporting debt peons. William Russell Grace wrote to his brother Michael in the early 1870s, There is lots of money in the business. 600 men in China costs [sic] $60,000. After coldly calculating a 10 percent death rate during the transpacific Steam Excavator, Technology and Culture 35, no. 3 (1994): , here 572, 574. The availability of Chinese debt peons may be one reason that a Peruvian mining proletariat did not emerge until the 1890s. On this point, see Josh DeWind, Peasants Become Miners: The Evolution of Industrial Mining Systems in Peru (New York, 1987), esp. chap George Washington Peck, as quoted in Robert Cushman Murphy, Bird Islands of Peru: The Record of a Sojourn on the West Coast (New York, 1925), Captain Congdon, as quoted in Debow s Review 16 (January 1854): 100.

14 The First Green Revolution 1041 passage, William continued, that cargo of 540 men can be sold the moment they are shipped [at] $340 hard dollars each or say $183, This lucrative trade in human cargoes centered on Macao, where Portuguese merchants organized the recruitment process that bound coolies to employers across the Pacific. Crimping and kidnapping were common means of supplementing more formal contractual arrangements, and many coolies found themselves inveigled to the islands... under specious promises. 49 The number of coolies who made up the guano labor force is notoriously difficult to ascertain. During the early 1840s, Peruvian convicts and army deserters supplied most of the labor for guano extraction, but in October 1849, the first Chinese workers arrived aboard the Danish ship Frederick William. Anaccountfrom1853registered 1,000 miners, most of them from China, toiling on the Chinchas. Initially, two plantation owners, Domingo Eliás and Juan Rodríguez, held exclusive government licenses for the introduction of coolies to the guano mines and coastal farms of Peru. Under their control, conditions remained abominable. A visitor to the islands wrote in 1853, The Chinese work almost naked under a tropical sun where it never rains. They are slender figures and do not look strong. 50 Abuses proved so outrageous that an international outcry prompted the Peruvian government to suspend the coolie trade in The government then reopened it in Finally, on July 26, 1874, representatives of the Chinese and Peruvian governments signed the Tratado de paz, amistad, comercio y navegación [Treaty of Peace, Friendship, Commerce and Navigation], which promoted Chinese commercial activities in Peru and encouraged movement of the labor trade away from guano digging and plantation labor and toward mainland mining operations and railroad work. All told, as many as 10,000 Chinese coolies may have dug guano on the Chincha Islands during the mid-1800s. 51 The Chinese bound for Peru resisted the cruel strictures of debt peonage, refusing to wait for long-overdue government assistance from imperial officials in distant Beijing. Resistance often took the form of rebellion during the Pacific crossing. 48 William R. Grace, as quoted in C. Alexander G. de Secada, Arms, Guano, and Shipping: The W. R. Grace Interests in Peru, , Business History Review 59, no. 4 (1985): , here On the coolie trade from Macao, see Stewart, Chinese Bondage in Peru, 17.Quotefrom The Chincha Islands, Nautical Magazine and Naval Chronicle, April1856,182.In1862,thePeruviangovernment granted labor contractor Andres Calderón a license to recruit 800 1,000 Hawaiians and Polynesians to dig guano on the Chinchas. See Juan de Arona, Lainmigración en el Perú: Monografía históricocrítica (Lima, 1891), Henry Evans Maude contends that the project failed to bring any of these Pacific Islanders to the Chinchas; Maude, Slavers in Paradise: The Peruvian Slave Trade in Polynesia, (Stanford, Calif., 1981), Letter from the Chincha Islands, as quoted in Meagher, The Coolie Trade, For numbers of workers on the Chinchas, see Levin, The Export Economies, 88;Meagher,The Coolie Trade, 224;andStewart,Chinese Bondage in Peru, 96.OnthecontractsgrantedtoEliás and Rodríguez, see Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Coolies, Shopkeepers, Pioneers: The Chinese of Mexico and Peru ( ), Amerasia 15, no. 2 (1989): , here 103. As of 1909, the Peruvian government limited Chinese immigration to relatives of Peruvian residents. By 1934, Peru had barred all Chinese entry. See Ayumi Takenaka, The Japanese in Peru: History of Immigration, Settlement, and Racialization, Latin American Perspectives 31, no. 3 (2004): 77 98, here 87; and Bernard Wong, A Comparative Study of the Assimilation of the Chinese in New York City and Lima, Peru, Comparative Studies in Society and History 20, no. 3 (1978): The text of the treaty appears in Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, Coleccion de los tratados del Perú (Lima, 1876), After the expiration of their indenture contracts, many Chinese migrants who came to Peru s coastal plantations and guano mines settled in Lima, where they established a thriving Chinatown known as the Barrio Chino. See, for example, Isabelle Lausent-Herrera, The Chinatown in Peru and the Changing Peruvian Chinese Community(ies), Journal of Chinese Overseas 7, no. 1 (2011):

15 1042 Edward D. Melillo As Basil Lubbock remarked, a rising of the coolies was the one terror that ever stalked behind the captain of a Chinese coolie ship. In order to prevent the ships from being captured by their passengers, the decks and hatchway openings were barred and barricaded like the old convict ships. 52 Attempts at physical confinement proved unsuccessful; no fewer than sixty-eight coolie ships experienced mutinies between 1847 and For guano merchants, however, lucrative ends justified horrifying means. Between 1840 and 1878, Peruvian guano exports surpassed 12.6 million metric tons (see Figure 2), garnering $750 million. Monetary sums of this magnitude were rare in the nineteenth century; justifiably, this period was known as Peru s Guano Era. 54 Few Peruvians benefited from the guano trade, however. Under the consignment system, their government auctioned off the extraction rights and marketing privileges to private mercantile houses in exchange for loans based on future profits. The British companies W. J. Meyers of Liverpool and Anthony Gibbs & Sons of London dominated the guano trade in the mid-1800s. A popular London rhyme of the period went: The House of Gibbs made their dibs selling the turds of foreign birds. 55 Guano profits financed the construction of lavish British estates, including the Gothic Revival mansion of Tyntesfield in North Somerset near Bristol. 56 Between 1841 and 1857, Britain imported 2.4 million metric tons of guano, which farmers used to fertilize crops of wheat, hops, and turnips. By 1846, the editors of the Journal of Agriculture commented, Guano is now so well known as an excellent promoter of green crops, that its use may be said to be firmly established in the husbandry of this country. 57 These nutrient-rich infusions produced wondrous results. British parliamentarian and agricultural journalist Chandos Wren Hoskyns praised guano as The Wizard of the Pacific, while the Scottish writer William Wallace Fyfe contended in 1859, Guano is, probably, the animal manure most justly 52 Basil Lubbock, Coolie Ships and Oil Sailers (Glasgow, 1935), Meagher, The Coolie Trade, These calculations are based on data from Shane J. Hunt, Price and Quantum Estimates of Peruvian Exports, (Princeton, N.J., 1973), 57 59; Antonio Raimondi, Islas, islotes y rocas del Perú, Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 7(1897): ;HeraclioBonilla,Guano y burguesia en el Perú (Lima, 1974); and Paul Gootenberg, Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru s Fictitious Prosperity of Guano, (Berkeley, Calif., 1993), 2. As Gootenberg notes, until the 1860s, the Peruvian peso and the U.S. dollar were equal in monetary value. To put the $750 million figure in relative perspective, one estimate suggests that California s gold exports between 1848 and 1860 totaled $650 million. See Larry Schweikart and Lynne Pierson Doti, From Hard Money to Branch Banking: California Banking in the Gold-Rush Economy, in James J. Rawls and Richard J. Orsi, eds., AGoldenState: Mining and Economic Development in Gold Rush California (Berkeley, Calif., 1999), , here James Higgins, Lima: A Cultural History (New York, 2005), W. M. Mathew, The House of Gibbs and the Peruvian Guano Monopoly (London, 1981). Texts of the actual contracts appear in P. Emilio Dancuart, ed., Anales de la hacienda pública de Perú: Historia ylegislación fiscal de la república, 24vols.(Lima, ),5:23 25.In1869,Peruabandonedthe consignment system when it contracted with the Paris-based firm Dreyfus Brothers & Co. to sell two million tons of guano on the European market. On Dreyfus Brothers & Co., see Levin, The Export Economies, FormoreonhowPeruserviceditsforeigndebtwithguanoprofits,allowingitto sustain its credit rating despite domestic political upheavals, see Catalina Vizcarra, Guano, Credible Commitments, and Sovereign Debt Repayment in Nineteenth-Century Peru, Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): ; and Peter F. Klaren, The Sugar Industry in Peru, Revista de Indias 65, no. 233 (2005): 33 48, here Plan for Reducing the Price of Guano Twenty-Five Per Cent, Journal of Agriculture 2(July 1846): 386.

16 The First Green Revolution 1043 FIGURE 2: Sources: ShaneJ.Hunt,Price and Quantum Estimates of Peruvian Exports, (Princeton, N.J., 1973), Table 21; José AntoniodeLavalleyGarcía, El guano y la agricultura nacional (Lima, 1914), 41; Antonio Raimondi, Islas, islotes y rocas del Perú, Boletín de la Sociedad Geográfica de Lima 7(1897): ; Heraclio Bonilla, Guano y burguesia en el Perú (Lima, 1974), ; and Richard Webb and Graciela Fernández Baca de Valdez, eds., Almanaque estadístico: Perú ennúmeros 1990 (Lima, 1990), 388. Note: During the War of the Pacific ( ), Chile occupied Peru s guano islands. in vogue in agriculture. 58 Unlike calcareous fertilizers, such as lime, gypsum, and marl, Peruvian bird excrement possessed the natural advantage of smelling like cow manure, which made it more acceptable to farmers. One British agriculturalist even recommended tasting it for definitive proof of this similitude. 59 British merchants also sold Peruvian guano to other nations, helping French and Prussian sugar beet farmers ease European dependence on Caribbean sugarcane imports. By 1860, Prussia switched from being a net sugar importer to being a net sugar exporter. 60 As a high-ranking Prussian Ministry of Agriculture official recalled, the mid-nineteenth century was a time in which we believed that there was no limit to the increase of [sugar beet] yields thanks to the ever growing availability of cheap commercial fertilizers. 61 Similarly, farmers in the Netherlands conducted extensive 58 Chandos Wren Hoskyns, Talpa; or, The Chronicles of a Clay Farm, 2nded.(Buffalo,N.Y.,1854), 90; William Wallace Fyfe, Agricultural Science Applied in Practice (London, 1859), On guano and hop cultivation in Britain, see Celia Cordle, The Guano Voyages, Rural History 18, no. 1 (2007): The guano-tasting suggestion can be found in Thompson, The Second Agricultural Revolution, 70. For an overview of the British demand for guano, see W. M. Mathew, Peru and the British Guano Market, , Economic History Review 23, no. 1 (1970): Wilhelm Ruprecht, The Historical Development of the Consumption of Sweeteners A Learning Approach, Journal of Evolutionary Economics 15, no. 3 (2005): , here Hugo Thiel, as quoted in Thomas Wieland, Scientific Theory and Agricultural Practice: Plant Breeding in Germany from the Late 19th to the Early 20th Century, Journal of the History of Biology 39, no. 2 (2006): , here 314. During the Meiji Period ( ), Japanese farmers became increasingly reliant on inputs of purchased fertilizers. Often these included herring fishmeal and guano

17 1044 Edward D. Melillo experimentation with Peruvian guano, and Dutch imports of the South American fertilizer grew by at least 7,000 metric tons per year during the period from 1865 to IN THEUNITED STATES, PERUVIAN GUANO came to symbolize progressive agricultural practices. Its fertilizing prowess received glowing endorsements from leading agricultural journals of the day, including the Farmers Register, thesouthern Cultivator, and the Farmer s Journal.In1853,aNorthCarolinafarmertoldtheFarmer s Journal that There are many rich fields in many parts of the country, which but for guano would have still been barren, failing to produce enough to pay the owner for their cultivation. The Peruvian fertilizer fueled bumper harvests of tobacco and cotton across the South. 63 Because of guano s recognized effectiveness, its price rose dramatically in the United States after it was first used in the 1840s. In 1843, a shipload of guano arrived in Baltimore and fetched $.07 a ton. Seven years later, the price hit $76 per ton, eventually leveling out at $50 per ton. Between 1860 and 1880, farmers throughout North and South Carolina, Georgia, Maryland, and Virginia expended a combined sum of $14,094,000 on commercial fertilizer. 64 High guano prices triggered anxiety among the cultivators who opted to invest in fertilizer supplements. American farmers soon began insisting that the federal government break Peru s guano monopoly. 65 President Millard Fillmore made guano acquisition a central foreign policy concern. In his first annual message, delivered on December 2, 1850, he announced, Peruvian guano has become so decollected from neighboring Pacific islands. It remains unclear whether the Japanese ever imported Peruvian guano. See Mataji Miyamoto, Yo taro Sakudo, andyasukichiyasuba, EconomicDevelopment in Preindustrial Japan, , Journal of Economic History 25, no. 4 (1965): , here 562; and Bruce F. Johnston, Agricultural Productivity and Economic Development in Japan, Journal of Political Economy 59, no. 6 (1951): , here 506. See also Nagahisa Kuroda, Report on a Trip to Marcus Island with Notes on the Birds, Pacific Science 8, no. 1 (1954): Merijn T. Knibbe, Feed, Fertilizer, and Agricultural Productivity in the Netherlands, , Agricultural History 74, no. 1 (2000): 39 57, here Quote from Weymouth T. Jordan, The Peruvian Guano Gospel in the Old South, Agricultural History 24, no. 4 (1950): , here 219. For other examples, see A. MacDonald, Results from Guano Manure, Farmers Register: A Monthly Publication 9, no. 12 (1841): ; and Solon Robinson, How to Use Guano, Southern Cultivator 9, no. 5 (1851): 70 71, here Wines, Fertilizer in America,39;ChesterMcArthurDestler, DavidDickson s SystemofFarming and the Agricultural Revolution in the Deep South, , Agricultural History 31, no. 3 (1957): 30 39, here 32; Wayne D. Rasmussen, The Impact of Technological Change on American Agriculture, , Journal of Economic History 22, no. 4 (1962): , here 580; and John Solomon Otto, Southern Agriculture during the Civil War Era, (Westport, Conn., 1994), 84. In 1897, Benjamin William Arnold claimed that guano had played a major role in the cultivation of bright yellow tobacco in the border counties of Virginia and North Carolina; Arnold, History of the Tobacco Industry in Virginia from 1860 to 1894 (Baltimore, 1897), 24 n. 1. For accounts of guano use on the Tidewater tobacco plantations along the Chesapeake Bay, see Solon Robinson, Guano: A Treatise of Practical Information for Farmers (New York, 1853), 13; and William L. Bradley, Bradley s Manual on Growing and Curing Tobacco (Boston, 1864), Jordan, The Peruvian Guano Gospel in the Old South, 216. For guano prices, see also Rosser H. Taylor, The Sale and Application of Commercial Fertilizers in the South Atlantic States to 1900, Agricultural History 21, no. 1 (1947): 46 52, here 47, 50. On the role of guano in the agricultural practices of the antebellum South, see Eugene D. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South, 2nded.(Middletown,Conn.,1989),92 94.

18 The First Green Revolution 1045 sirable an article to the agricultural interest of the United States that it is the duty of the Government to employ all means properly in its power for the purpose of causing that article to be imported into the country at a reasonable price. Nothing will be omitted on my part toward accomplishing this desirable end. 66 The passage of the Guano Islands Act of 1856, which legalized the private appropriation of unclaimed guano islands in the name of the United States, signaled the urgency with which legislators pursued the procurement of organic fertilizer: Whenever any citizen of the United States discovers a deposit of guano on any island, rock, or key, not within the lawful jurisdiction of any other Government, and not occupied by the citizens of any other Government, and takes peaceable possession thereof, and occupies the same, such island, rock, or key may, at the discretion of the President, be considered as appertaining to the United States. 67 Yet such far-reaching mandates proved superfluous. During the late 1870s, as Peru s guano supplies began to dwindle, excitement shifted to the fertilizing potential of sodium nitrate. 68 In 1877, the Saturday Evening Post published a story titled Immense Nitre Deposits, Which Will Prove of More Value Than Guano. 69 That same year, the editors of the Atlanta farm journal Southern Cultivator wrote of nitrate of soda, Few fertilizers act so rapidly when judiciously applied. 70 Professor Mason Graham Ellzey of the Virginia Agricultural and Mechanical College wrote to Baltimore s American Farmer to recommend that farmers use nitrate of soda because Wheat following corn, or even tobacco, must have artificial supplies of nitrogen, or amaximumcropcannotbemade.thefeedingofstockonthefieldforafewmonths before the corn is planted, gives the land some nitrogen, but certainly much less than is provided in 100 lbs. per acre of nitrate of soda and less than is removed by the corn. 71 One reason for the popularity of sodium nitrate fertilizer was that it dis- 66 James D. Richardson, ACompilationoftheMessagesandPapersofthePresidents, ,10 vols. (Washington, D.C., ), 5: U.S. Code, Title 48, Chapter 8, Section The whole act is covered in sections On the legal history of the guano islands claimed by U.S. citizens, see Christina Duffy Burnett, The Edges of Empire and the Limits of Sovereignty: American Guano Islands, American Quarterly 57, no. 3 (2005): For more on the Guano Islands Act and U.S. imperialism, see Jimmy M. Skaggs, The Great Guano Rush: Entrepreneurs and American Overseas Expansion (New York, 1994). In March 1843, British merchants began exploiting guano on Ichaboe Island, which lies off the coast of present-day Namibia. Excavating the West African deposit was a short-lived venture. Ichaboe s total guano reserves were only 300,000 metric tons, half of the total product coming out of Peru on an annual basis in the 1860s. Within three years, Ichaboe s deposits were totally depleted. Benjamin L. Turner, Emmanuel Frossard, and Darren S. Baldwin, eds., Organic Phosphorus in the Environment (Cambridge, Mass., 2005), 51. In 1857, the U.S. took possession of Navassa, a small island situated between Haiti and Jamaica. In 1889, African American guano diggers on Navassa revolted against their bosses and killed five white supervisors. For an account of this uprising and its aftermath, see Jennifer C. James, Buried in Guano : Race, Labor, and Sustainability, American Literary History 24, no. 1 (2012): ; and John Cashman, Slaves under Our Flag : The Navassa Island Riot of 1889, Maryland Historian 24, no. 2 (1993): In 1860, a Chilean named José SantosOssadiscoveredthesalitre deposits in Antofagasta. See Julio H. Iglesias, José SantosOssa:Perfilesdeunconquistador,biografía (Santiago, 1945). Peru revived its guano trade in the twentieth century. See Gregory T. Cushman, The Most Valuable Birds in the World : International Conservation Science and the Revival of Peru s Guano Industry, , Environmental History 10, no. 3 (2005): Immense Nitre Deposits, Saturday Evening Post, November24,1877,3. 70 Nitrate of Soda, Southern Cultivator 35 (September 1877): M. G. Ellzey, Nitrogen and Phosphates, American Farmer (Baltimore) 3(September1,1884): 237.

19 1046 Edward D. Melillo solved easily in water, making its nitrogen readily available to plant roots shortly after application. 72 UNTIL 1879, THE NITRATE TRADE involved Bolivia, Peru, and Chile. During the War of the Pacific ( ), Chile defeated the allied forces of Peru and Bolivia. With the 1883 Treaty of Ancón, Chile acquired the provinces of Tarapacá, Tacna, and Arica. Additionally, Bolivia forfeited its coastal access when it ceded the Pacific seaport of Antofagasta to Chile in Thus, Chile won exclusive control over the valuable nitrate mines in the northern Atacama Desert, which extended 400 miles (644 kilometers) from north to south. 73 In the parched sands of the Atacama, a crucial element of life abounded. Sodium nitrate (salitre) containsapproximately16percentnitrogenand27percentsodium. Nearly all of the mined sodium nitrate in the world originates from deposits in the deserts of northwestern South America, where it occurs in a mixture with other salts, such as potassium nitrate, and assorted trace metals, iodine, and insoluble compounds. The most nitrogen-rich form of extractable nitrate is known as caliche, a calcite-bound layer of rock found beneath several meters of gravel and powdered composites. Miners (calicheros) workedfornitraterefineries(oficinas), which were owned by wealthy Chilean salitreros and financed by British and American capital. Among the most notorious captains of industry to operate in the nitrate fields was John Thomas North, an enigmatic English mechanic who began working in the salitre oficinas in A dozen years later, he had become the undisputed Nitrate King, having built his fortune by supplying the parched port city of Iquique with fresh water and then using the profits from this enterprise, along with financing from aliverpool-basedmerchanthouse,topurchasenitratecompaniesandrailways.as one of North s detractors, the Financial News, quippedin1888, Hewasheardlamenting there were not more elements in nature than air, earth and water, as they were such nice things to finance. 74 North s control of the nitrate trade was overwhelming in its scope. The flamboyant entrepreneur was either the founder or the co-founder of seventeen of the twenty-three British companies involved in the Chilean nitrate trade in 1890; thus he controlled 71 percent of an industry listed by the London Stock Exchange at a total nominal capital of 10,000, Such colossal sums represented the value 72 A. F. Gustafson, Soils and Soil Management (New York, 1941), AconcisesummaryofthewarcanbefoundinV.G.Kiernan, ForeignInterestsintheWarof the Pacific, Hispanic American Historical Review 35, no. 1 (1955): For a Bolivian interpretation of events, see Roberto Querejazu Calvo, Guano, salitre, sangre: Historia de la Guerra del Pacífico (La Paz, 1979). For a Peruvian perspective, see Heraclio Bonilla, Un siglo a la deriva: Ensayos sobre el Perú, Bolivia y la guerra (Lima, 1980). In 1929, the Tacna-Arica Compromise gave Arica to Chile and Tacna to Peru. Today, Chile s nitrate region extends from 19 to 26 degrees south latitude, encompassing the provinces of Tarapacá andantofagasta.althoughthecombinedareaofthetwoprovincesis185,000 km 2 (comparable in size to the United Kingdom), the nitrate region occupies only 30,000 km 2 of this territory (similar in size to Belgium). 74 Michael Monteón, John T. North, the Nitrate King, and Chile s Lost Future, Latin American Perspectives 30, no. 6 (2003): Quote from Harold Blakemore, British Nitrates and Chilean Politics, : Balmaceda and North (London, 1974), William Edmundson, The Nitrate King: A Biography of Colonel John Thomas North (New York, 2011), 4. Although North s role in the Chilean civil war of 1891 is a matter of considerable debate, his

20 The First Green Revolution 1047 FIGURE 3: Map showing territorial changes resulting from the War of the Pacific and the 1929 Tacna Arica Compromise. Produced by Springer Cartographics LLC for Edward D. Melillo.

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